4. DHCAT Requirements, Official And Unofficial

When it comes to getting the most current version of DHCAT (2.0.1) up and running, the official software requirements include the following components, as mentioned earlier in this story:

DivX Pro 6.4 or a higher-numbered version (we used 6.5). Though you can download DivX on a free trial basis from the company Web site, we couldn't get DHCAT to work properly until we purchased a valid license for the commercial version. A DLNA compliant UPnP media server that supports DivX to MPEG2 and WMV to MPEG2 transcoding. Unless the machine under test comes with a bundled media server, this practically means running the Intel ViiV Media Server (which works only with Intel processors) or the Nero Media Home media server (which works with both Intel and AMD processors).

Unofficially, we learned that numerous other additional components are necessary for those seeking to get from a bare Windows XP SP2 installation (our standard benchmarking platform) to a workable configuration. Here's the list of additional bits and pieces we had to add to get things to work properly:

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and SP1 for .NET Framework 1.1. Windows Media Player 10. Windows MCE Rollup 2. Windows Installer 3.1. Cyberlink PowerDVD 7. Here again, we had to use a licensed version rather than the trial version, because encoding video material involves encoding the audio for the sound track, and the eval version doesn't offer audio encoding capability. We used Nero Vision Express for all installations of Nero Media Home in our benchmarks; all those that worked, anyway. We tried other versions without success, including older versions, as well as the latest version bundled with Nero 7.5. The specific file to search for is named NVE-3.1.0.21_no_yt.exe.

Looking at the list above, it's hard to believe that it took more than a week to arrive at this mixture of elements, which proved both necessary and sufficient to make DHCAT 2.0.1 work. Note that if you e-mail Intel through its capabilities forum, they will mail you a DVD for DHCAT 2.0; after installing that you can use its auto-update feature to download the update for DHCAT 2.0.1. All of the files in the preceding list may be located online by typing download in your favorite search engine, or visiting the vendor's Web site where we indicate that purchase of a licensed copy is required.

It may also be useful to readers to observe that while there are a great many DLNA compliant media servers available from a wide range of vendors - including Microsoft's own Media Player 11 - not many of them can handle transcoding tasks as well as serve up media across the network on demand. For all practical purposes, unless you purchase a PC or media device that includes built-in media server capabilities - with or without transcoding abilities - the ViiV and Nero Media Home offerings represent the most obvious if not necessarily the best options available.